As a CxO, can you afford earnings surprises? Don’t you need to give the Board accurate projections for next year and meet them? Won’t your shareholders reward you if you could do that? Don’t you need to plan for the coming year and not just manage reactively? It might be a cliché — but failing to plan is indeed planning to fail.
What if you could do the following?
- Have a real-time view of the state of the business at the customer/product family/key opportunity/forecast level that you could depend on
- Identify who was getting the job done and who was struggling
- See whether sales team is making progress at the most important customers for your business
- Didn’t have to spend days and days preparing for reviews but instead could take that time to get things done to help sales win the business and improve organizational performance
NEHANET Annual Operating Plan eliminates earnings surprises. It is an easy-to-use planning tool that helps management to plan for the coming fiscal year by relying on data from the prior year and the trends for the upcoming year. It helps set target sales revenue for all regions/territories for the upcoming fiscal year, coordinate the activities to achieve the target, and measure the performance by giving variance of the actual versus forecasted revenue. By involving everyone in the planning process from day one, to ensuring that daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly activities drive the plan, to showing real-time actual vs plan numbers, the AOP keeps everyone laser focused on making the plan numbers.
AOP addresses the following questions:
- How did we do last year?
- How much do we want to do this year?
- How do we meet the goals?
- Monitor and measure in real-time how you are performing against the stated goals.
AOP is typically developed once per fiscal year. It is set in a top-down approach. You as the CEO (or Management) will set targets for your direct reports, who in turn will set targets for their direct reports. The account managers can click through the key accounts in their territory and develop the AOP for those accounts. You can also click through to the Opportunities for a key account and develop the Opportunities in detail. In addition, it gives you visibility to all the activities needed to meet the plan target. Plan numbers are entered quarterly for the entire fiscal year. A clear owner is also assigned for each level. Each owner is supposed to align their plan with the plan for the level above and the level below their own level. The AOP module relies on the user reporting hierarchy as configured in the user module. The interface is hierarchical and you can iterate up and down through the levels, allocating and adjusting numbers and reconciling the numbers for that level and the aggregate from all lower levels. At each level, you will have visibility to last year’s performance for that level to help plan for the current year. Once completed, the plan can be locked till the next fiscal year begins.
The AOP includes activities and tasks for everyone involved to meet the plan goals. These tasks can vary significantly in time and scope. Timely execution of the activities and measuring the plan actual with the target gives everyone with the visibility to what adjustments needs to be done within the organization. Account Plans are typically reviewed on an annual or quarterly basis. Opportunity Plans are typically reviewed more frequently to adjust to Customer demands. The system gives you Actual Versus Commit variance by Quarter and Year to Date for each level of the hierarchy.
A perfect plan and a vision.
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